ROBERTA SMITH ESSAY
To paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there is a whole lot of art making going on right now. All different kinds. But you’d hardly know it from the contemporary art that New York’s major museums have been serving up lately, and particularly this season.
The current exhibition of Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art along with the recent ones of Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum and of Urs Fischer at the New Museum have generated a lot of comment pro and con. So has the Tino Sehgal performance exhibition now on view in an otherwise emptied-out Guggenheim rotunda. But regardless of what you think about these artists individually, their shows share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note.
The goal in organizing museum exhibitions, as in collecting, running a gallery and - to cite the most obvious example - being an artist, should be individuation and difference, finding a voice of your own. Instead we’re getting example after example of squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous takes on that unruly early ‘70s mix of Conceptual, Process, Performance, installation and language-based art that is most associated with the label Post-Minimalism. Either that or we’re getting exhibitions of the movement’s most revered founding fathers: since 2005, for example, the Whitney has mounted exhibitions of Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham. We cannot live by the de-materialization - or the slick re-materialization - of the art object alone.
What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity . A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.
Why hasn’t there been a major New York show of Philip Taaffe, whose layered, richly colored paintings are actually taking the medium of painting in a direction it hasn’t been before? Why has a retrospective of the painter Chris Ofili - with his volatile mix of color, pattern, popular culture and identity politics - opened at the Tate Britain but not yet been scheduled for a New York museum? And why not see what a survey of the work of an artist as endlessly varied and yet dauntingly consistent as Joe Zucker might look like? If the public can handle an empty museum as art, it can deal with some paintings made of cotton balls. I, for one, would rather see a tightly organized overview of Mr. Zucker’s work than Marlene Dumas’s warmed-over Expressionism, which was recently displayed in bulk at the Museum of Modern Art. The Guggenheim doesn’t play it as safe as the Modern or the Whitney. With its Sehgal show, as with its “Theanyspacewhatever” exhibition in 2008, it acts like a place where anything can happen. But shows where we encounter an artist’s singleminded, highly personal pursuit that proceeds one object at a time tend to feature past masters.
The Guggenheim’s recent, fantastic Kandinsky exhibition was an example (as was the Modern’s Ensor show). Yet there are plenty of artists working this way now.
It is amazing that some aspect of Laura Owens’s or Dana Schutz’s work is not thought worth some kind of small, well-organized museum show. The same goes for Lari Pittman, who could sustain something larger. European artists, who bring a little more wit and accessibility to Post-Minimalism, include Rosemarie Trockel and Fischli & Weiss. Someone should do a show of the early paintings of Peter Doig.
Museum curators have a responsibility to their public and to history to be more ecumenical . They owe it to the public to present a balanced menu that involves painting as well as video and photography and sculpture. They need to think outside the hivemind, both distancing themselves from their personal feelings to consider what’s being wrongly omitted and tapping into their own subjectivity to show us what they really love.
